OmegaMom

When I was but a child—somewhere in the region of 10 or 11 or 12—I had my first sinus infection.  Or, perhaps a better way of putting it, my first memorable sinus infection.

“Memorable” is the definitive word.  For all I know, I had previous ones, but simply don’t remember them.

This one began, as all sinus infections begin for me, with soft, puffy skin by the right side of the nose and above the eye and a mild headache.  But the skin kept swelling and swelling, both beside the eye and above it, until my eye was swollen shut.

Um.  That’s a bit of a sinus infection, wouldn’t you say?

My parents, of course, hauled me off to either the doctor or the emergency room; at this point, looking back into the veils of time, I can’t remember which.  What I do remember is being diagnosed with an acute sinus infection (aka “The Sinus Infection From Hell”) and being ensconced in the hospital for a few days while the medicos took care of it.  In particular, I remember The Machine.

It was square and tall and white.  It had a water tank.  It rolled on wheels.  It had a hose.  It had a bulbous glass end that looked somewhat like a dainty glass minaret (or perhaps a stylized glass p3nis).

–>  WARNING:  TMI GROSSITUDE FOLLOWS! <–

This bulbous glass tube was the nozzle end of great suction power.  It’s purpose was to vacuum out my sinuses, sort of a powered, grown-up sized version of the snot sucker every modern parent is familiar with (even those of us who did not have mild, calm babies who would lie still for the dropper up their noses, but babies that would fight against it like snarly feral kittens with every ounce of strength in their small bodies).  Every few hours, a nurse would wheel The Machine into my room, dig the bulbous end into my nose, and then power it up (it sounded sort of like a home power tool), at which point—o blessed relief!—large quantities of blobby mucous would be removed from my pressure-filled sinuses to be deposited into the water tank like grotesque jellyfish.

It was truly, spectacularly, deliciously gross.  The kind of grossness that pre-teen and teenage boys revel in.  I will admit, pre-teen girls revel in it, too.  Maybe even post-menopausal 50 year olds.  I mean, it was gross, but it was really, truly cool, as well.

After this acute infection, I was plagued with sinus infections all the time.  None of them reached the heights of swelling and pain that that particular incident did, but I became very familiar with the soft, painful feeling of slightly swollen skin next to the bridge of my nose and right below my eyebrow bone, which heralded the coming of a sinus headache.  Bleah.  Luckily, our stay in the dry Southwest seems to have changed the tenor of my sinus infections, so they are more cheekbone-y than forehead-y, and my number of sinus headaches decreased immensely.  (Migraine headaches, however, ramped up as I got older, but have now pretty much vanished since the hormonal roller-coaster has ended, yay!)

Goodness knows if the Power Sucker is the modern standard of care.  There’s probably a totally different protocol to follow now, something with lots o’ drugs shrinking the mucus and computerized tracking.  But there was a certain splendid satisfaction to the Power Sucker:  You knew that the mucus blockage was being reduced, and damned if it didn’t feel like it right away, no delays to have drugs kick in or anything.  Just *blammo!*, five minutes of vacuuming and three to four hours of relief.

It makes me wonder why they don’t sell a Home Power Sucker for those days when people’s sinuses go on a rampage.

All of which is to say, I am dealing with some sort of sinus infection right now, one which is mainly concentrated in my eustachian tubes and leaves me feeling like someone is poking an icepick into my ears.  Bleah.  I don’t think the Power Sucker would even help this kind of problem; the main thing to do is to avoid milk and milk products.  (This is problematic when there are fresh chocolate chip cookies in the house.  Or any kind of cookies.  I am of the mindset that cookies must have milk.  Realizing that milk goops up my eartubes has put a damper on my Girl Scout Cookie rampage.  Now I have to weigh the options:  Drink milk with my cookies, The Way God Meant Us To Eat Cookies, or be an adult and realize that if I do, I will have icepicks in my ears a few days later.  Gah.)

(And, no, I have not tried Neti Pots.  What can I say?  Hey, if I wanted to be waterboarded, I’d have become a jihadist, y’know?!)

(To Noreen and Ms. Vinegar Martinis:  You do realize that even the thought of Olympics of any sort scares the snot out of me???  Hmmm.  Maybe that would be useful, given the topic of this post.  In the meantime, I will just let her do team and see how long it lasts.

To Sarah From Italy:  The snow will be gone soon.  I promise.  Sooner for you than me, though!

To Catalyst:  Yeah, but, see, if I can see Russia from my house, that means I’m looking at Siberia, and Siberia is where exiles go.  Hah!

To Kaz and Sarah (again):  Yeah, she has some fine lines.  I’ve gotten used to seeing girls of various ages and sizes flying all over the place, so the dotter’s flips and handstands and what-not don’t scare me any more.)

Instant negotiation mode:  Anyone who has been a parent can recognize that.  It’s when the child asks for something, and you give an answer that isn’t what that child wants, and the child immediately starts pushing the boundary back.  It’s how “maybe” or “I’ll think about it” gets magically re-arranged into “yes” in a child’s mind.  It’s how “next Saturday” becomes “tomorrow” when there’s talk of a friend coming over, or “one piece of candy after dinner” turns into “three!  now!”

So we have told the dotter that we will be visiting China when she’s 10 or 11.  This immediately gets turned into “why not when I’m 9?  Or 8?” whenever it comes up.

Why not?  Well, there are finances.  A trip to China is spendy:  there are the flights, the hotels, the meals, the tours, the museums, the tour guides, more.  This means saving up money.  (Sigh.  Really.  I actually looked just now at real, current prices for heritage tours, plus prices for air fare.  So, yeah, 10…that would give us enough time to save up the dough.)  In addition, there’s the question of maturity.  A trip when she’s 8 is likely to become a blur when she’s an adult, whereas a trip when she’s 10 is more likely to leave specifics in the memory.

A trip to China when she’s young is not an “if”, though it may have seemed like it to some readers.  A series of trips to China is an “if”.  In a perfect world, we would have enough money to traipse across the continents whenever the whim took us, but this is not a perfect world.  (Actually, in a perfect world, she would have been raised by her birthparents, and this would all be moot.)  We are able to say “Yes, we will take you to China” once; we cannot guarantee more than that.

My international adoptee readers may not like that, but that’s the way it goes:  We can schedule one trip, we may schedule two, and it would be really nice but very unlikely to do more than that before the dotter hits college age and starts wanting to make her own travel itineraries, probably including such parent-pleasing destinations as Ft. Lauderdale or Baja California during spring break.

(Excuse me while I start hyperventilating and practically faint at the very thought of my darlin’ innocent dotter in the midst of the heathen sun-loving, fun-loving, drinking & debauching freshmen and sophomores who crowd into the resorts during spring break.  Specifically male freshmen and sophomores who might be eyeing her with lustful intent.  ACK!  La-la-la, I’m not thinking about it!!!!)

Ahem.  Back now.

My non-adoption-related blog readers may think we shouldn’t do it at all.  That’s what’s interesting being the parent of an internationally adopted child in these days of Ye Olde Interwebz:  one can read all the mutterings, meanderings, thoughts and rants and dispassionately logical layouts of adult adoptees, and become assimilated into the Adoption Borg–but not quite enough, at which point the non-adoption people in one’s life think that you have become totally and absolutely obsessive about adoption and you’re going to turn the child into a neurotic wanker as a result. 

The upshot of all this:  none of your audience is completely satisfied.  Well, phooey on that:  We’re doing what we can, the best we think we can, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go suck lemons.  Or something like that.  Mainly, we’re tootling along in life doing what we think is best, and trying to keep adoption issues and Chinese culture an open item to integrate into the family dynamic without turning it into the be-all, end-all, and still doing the normal school- and summer-camp- and gymnastics- and holiday-gatherings- and family-visits-balance in life.

In 2008, our first real snow was October 7.

In 2007, our first real snow was sometime in early October.

This year has been warm.  The lakes froze over only a week or two ago.  What precipitation we’ve had has been rain.  But mostly, it’s been grey and chill, but neither cold nor snowy.

Tonight, after putting the dotter to bed, I peered out a window, and noticed…was it?  Could it be?

Yes!  It’s snowing!

In a comment to yesterday’s post, Meri asked:

Since you are originally from the SW, how hard was it to adjust to the dark winters? and driving in snow!

The dark winters have been a real problem for me.  The past two years, I have made sure to visit my mom, GrannyJ, in mid-December so that I can get a dose of sunshine right around the winter solstice, when the days are shortest.  Our first winter here, I was utterly miserable.  GrannyJ sent me a variety of sculpted suns to cheer me up.  Bless her!  I had allowed my prescription for little blue happy pills (Zoloft) to expire, which made everything worse.

So, in January 2008 I trekked off to the local Doc-in-a-Box and got a new prescription.  That, plus the rapidly lengthening days, helped pull me back into a more sanguine state of mind.

Last year, OmegaDad bought me a Magic Light for Christmas, and it seemed to help some, too.  But I may be simply adjusting to the (horrible, awful, miserable) darkness, where the noonday sun is about as high as a late spring afternoon back in the Lower 48.

As for driving in the snow.  Girl.  I may have been in the southwest, but it was the mountains of the southwest.  We regularly got more snow in Small Mountain University Town each winter than we have gotten here.  The main difference is that in Small Mountain University Town, the snow came down in Great Huge Heaps, all at once, then melt.  We would end up with 24 to 36 inches per storm.  Here, a ten-incher is a big snow–however, once it starts snowing, the snow doesn’t melt until, oh, April.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that I grew up in Chicago.  Even though I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was about 23 or 24, I had plenty of experience driving in snow after that before I moved west.

In sum, the snow and driving in the snow is no problem, but the lack of light is a killer.

The dotter was “grounded” today from playing at other kids’ houses or having them over, due to yesterday’s misunderstanding.  But we did send her off to “Parents’ Night Out”, mainly because I wanted a quiet evening with OmegaDad.

We rented a movie.  He bought smoked salmon and an array of cheeses and crackers, we had grapes and home-grown carrots and sugar snap peas and dilly dip.

We watched the movie (”Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”–sweet and odd and funny).  We ate.  We joked with each other.  It was relaxing and peaceful.

I have two or three post ideas rolling about in my head:

• In extremis - I read Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer.  There was a scene in there that made me think of this last year’s Iditarod race, and how people who choose to go into an extreme situation, a possibly competitive situation, may view “moral situations” differently.
• A slew of interesting adoption posts have hit my blog reader recently.  There’s the question of “should you adopt internationally/interracially?”  There’s the question of “should international adoptive parents try to ‘open’ the adoption/perform birthparent searches?”  There’s the question of international adoptive parents who deliberately close the door on the culture-of-origin.
• Q&A - Ask me questions!  I need post ideas!

Later, gators.

So, sitting in my comment approval queue for the past, oh, two weeks, has been this delightful little tidbit:

{Hey|Hi|Hello|How are you doing|What’s up|How’s it going|Nice to be here}, I {liked|{love|enjoyed}|read} the post. {Recently|Of Late|Lately} {I’ve|I have|I’ve become} been more {interested|engaged|curious} in chickens and {coops|henhouses|hencoops|chicken coops} myself. Been {looking|searching|looking for} around for a {coop|henhouse|chicken coop|hencoop}, or more {information|info} {so|therefore|and then|and so|thus|indeed|hence} anything that is {putting|setting|placing|positioning} me in the {right|good|correct|adequate|proper|faithful|true|accurate} direction is {very|really} helpful. There is a {lot|heap|great deal|tidy sum|bunch|plenty|mass|mountain} of {information|info|data} out there to {sort|screen} through.

Some dude or dudette has this script, see.  S/he’s supposed to troll the net looking for blogs about (subject), which, in this case, is chicken coops.  Then s/he’s supposed to select only one of each group of word choices.

But s/he was lazy, and this is what I got.  I found it amusing.  Now that I’ve shared it with y’all, I can safely delete it.

What do you do when the power goes out?  If you’re like me, you wait a minute or two before you do anything, because you know it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  If it lasts longer than a few minutes, then it’s time to haul out the candles and lamps, and maybe give a call to the local electric company.

What do you do if it’s not just your house, your neighborhood?  What if it’s your city?  Well, folks who have been in hurricanes or earthquakes know it’s just a matter of time before the services come back on; the news is filled with folks telling you what’s caused the outage, estimates of how long it will take to get things working again, where the evacuation centers are, and passing on the information that people out of the area are working hard and it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  The realities, of course, are often different than the estimates, but you are assured that someone’s taking care of things.

What if it’s not just your city?  What if it’s everywhere?  What if, at the same time as the (electric) power went out, all batteries went dead, all internal combustion motors died, gunpowder stopped working…everything stopped working?

Imagine living in, say, Los Angeles.  Or Phoenix.  Or the East Coast metroplex stretching from northern Virginia all the way up to the middle of New England.  Imagine realizing, fairly quickly, that there is no power, that no-one can fix it, and there’s no way to replenish the food at your local grocery store–if you’re lucky enough to live near enough to walk or bike to it.  Imagine 40 million people all getting hungry and thirsty, and all very, very scared.  Add in the fact that no fire engines work, no police cars work, no ambulances work, and every single airplane in the sky has just become a plummeting bomb filled with thousands of gallons of flammable liquids…Top it off with ravaging illnesses in a few weeks, as unsanitary living conditions spread (40 million people pooping and nowhere to put the poop).

Now imagine it happening worldwide.

That’s the premise set up in the first chapter of S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire: A Novel of the Change.  News of a strange, enormous electrical storm affecting the island of Nantucket is immediately followed by radios, lights, everything going dead.  The world changes in an instant.  Is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  No-one knows.  The novel follows one woman, Juniper MacKenzie, a Wiccan who leads a group of survivors from Corvallis, OR, and one man, Mike Havel, who was piloting a puddle jumper for a rich man and his family through the Idaho mountains when the lights went out, manages to crash land, and leads them to safety.

Food is a big issue in the novel–the realization by modern people of just how much work is involved in getting food on the table, and how important it is to survive.  And violence.  Lack of order leads to lack of law leads to violence.  (Warning:  graphically described violence–you may get tired of hearing about how people’s bowels let loose when they get thrust by a sword.)

The main focus is how they survive, and how their communities develop and cope with a larger, more ruthless community led by Norman Arminger, a former history professor who is now living his dream of resurrecting post-Norman-Conquest medievalism in the city of Portland.

The next two novels–The Protector’s War and A Meeting at Corvallis–take place nine years later.  All three communities that were the center of the first book have stabilized and grown, and it’s obvious that the younger generation is taking things that most of the olders consider “pretend” morale boosters much more seriously.  MacKenzie’s clan–started almost as a joke–has become more and more “clannish”; Havel’s younger BearKillers, who were just kids when The Change occurred, revere him as a leader and warleader; youngsters who grew up in Arminger’s Protectorate are internalizing the huffy formality of court life.  And there’s a war.  But the bad guys aren’t necessarily as horribly bad as they seemed…and there’s a growing sense that the deus ex machina that caused The Change is interfering in a mystic way with some folks.  Just a bit.

The next two novels–The Sunrise Lands and The Scourge of God–take place twenty-one years after The Change. Juniper’s son, Rudi, who was the focus of a prophecy at his dedication ceremony at the end of the very first book, is now an adult, and facing a Quest–to go to Nantucket Island, source of the mysterious storm that caused The Change.  New characters are introduced, but old characters are there as well.  Old enemies now work together as somewhat comfortable allies.  New enemies appear.  Nantucket is a mysterious place that bends the space-time continuum in weird ways.  Some of the old survivors are dying off, while those that remain are befuddled by how the youngsters have internalized the makeshift morale boosters used to get through the crisis, turning them into a way of life.  The youngsters, in their turn, regard the tales of “before The Change” as so much mythical mumbo jumbo and roll their eyes when the older folks go into reminiscing. 

The mystical clues get thicker and happen more often…is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  Is Rudi the reincarnation of King Arthur?  How can some of the eeevul Prophet’s folk become essentially zombies?  You have to wait until the final volume is published in September.  I hope.

In the midst of all the blood and gore were some really intriguing ideas and amusing byplay.  MacKenzie clansfolk heading to the battlefield with their longbows, riding bicycles.  A social taboo against singing “The End Of The World As We Know It”.  Teenagers who take Tolkein literally, and start the Dunedain Rangers as a do-gooders’ association supported by payments for escorting caravans and a retainer for ridding the land of bandits–they speak High Elvish amongst themselves, and have had to cobble together ways to curse and talk about menstruation.  A society based on leadership of a bunch of yogi who were having a conference in the Tetons on how to use the newfangled internet to advertise their businesses when The Change occurred.  The Society for Creative Anachronism pops up all over the place as people who could adjust to the new world just a little bit easier.

I enjoyed the books.  You do have to suspend your disbelief at the mechanics of The Change–even his characters note that its effects happen only on the surface of the earth–but I assume the deux ex machina has taken care of that.  Some readers have commented that they don’t like Stirling’s descriptive style, so be warned:  he spends a helluva lot of time setting the scene, incorporating sights, sounds, smells.  I like it; you may not.

One of my little pet peeves about the blogosphere is that people can use Teh Google to do a search on a particular phrase, find a particular post on a particular blog, and extrapolate a whole boatload of stuff from that one post.  Usually the people who do things like this are people with a bee in their bonnet about some particular Issue.  An example:  A PETA person performs a search on “animal experimentation”, finds a post on a medico’s blog about an experiment in which the medico makes one comment that could be considered complimentary of one particular experiment that involved animals, and goes nutsoid.  Or a super-attachment parent–the kind who proclaims that CIO (crying it out) is child abuse, that baby-wearing is The Only Way To Raise A Child, and co-sleeping is Da Bomb–finds a post on a mommy blog that says that particular mom writing that particular blog in that particular post found CIO to work for her, and posts a comment excoriating that mommy blogger up, down, left, right.  Or similar examples.  (Please note that these are just pulled out of my ass as examples, with no specific blogs or commenters in mind.)

The other day, I logged into OmegaMom’s admin section, found an unapproved comment was listed, and opened it up to look at it.  It was a comment on this post.  Note that this post is two years old.

The comment was:

She ‘chose’ you? She had no choice! Any child would chose their natural mother and country! She settled for you! Please acknowledge her feelings later when they are not so easy to manage. ;-(

Well.  Boy howdy, am I ever chastened.  My outlook on life and adoption has been totally turned around by that one comment.  Goodness knows that prior to Dolly’s little contribution to my love fest of two years ago, I was not introspective about adoption.  Nosirreebob; I am one of those folk who think that adoption is the be-all and end-all of family building approaches, dontchaknow.  I do my very best to squelch any and all mention of my dotter’s birthparents; I refuse to talk about China and her life before we brought her home; I glory in the phrase “Gotcha Day!”; and, of course, I am the kind of person who would gladly go into adoption in a corrupt regime with my eyes closed and my fingers in my ears, singing “La la la, I can’t hear you!”  But now that Dolly has so graciously informed me about the ins and outs of adoption issues so succinctly and precisely, I am A Changed Woman.

Ahem.

That was, in case you didn’t realize it, a wee tad of sarcasm.

Just a wee tad.

The context:  We (the Omegas) were discussing the day we met OmegaDotter.  OmegaDotter was, at the time, four years old.  We told her that the people in the CCAA in China had chosen her for us.  She said a cute little, sweet little, “I chose you!”, which I thought was sweet, adorable, loving, yadda yadda yadda.  I hugged her, kissed her, told her we loved her, and promptly wrote about it in my blog.

(In between various posts like this, and this, and this.  And all of these.  That last specific one, by the way, was all of nine days after the one Dolly so kindly commented on.  Post that sometimes really disturb some of my readers who are not in the adoption world, and make them feel I’m paying too much attention to adoption issues…)

But, hey.  I guess what I should have done was to grab my four-year-old by the shoulders, stare into her eyes intently, and tell her that no, she didn’t choose us, that she had no choice, that she “settled” for us, that she needed to face her deep-down feelings right then, right there, and she didn’t really love us anyway, we were just a poor substitute for her real parents and birth culture.

Obviously, Dolly doesn’t have a four-year-old. 

So, folks, do me a favor:  If you chance upon a blog that says something you really and truly disagree with, read a few other entries in that blog, like a month’s worth, just to see what that blogger might really be about.  If, after doing that, you feel like the blogger is still lower than the lint in a worm’s navel, go right ahead and post your comment.  Otherwise, regard it as one of those internet exercises in restraint, like the one where after you write a blistering email in the heat of fury, you save it as a draft, go for a long walk, and then return to re-read it before hitting the “send” button.  Almost every time I do that, I end up deleting the draft and substituting a pretty toned-down “I disagree” version instead.  Or just not sending the email at all.

Because, at the end of it all, while I’m miffed at Dolly’s presumption, I’m also amused.  Because I am so not her target.  She’s aiming at a fictional version of OmegaMom, and when she fired, it went off about 180 degrees away from her intended mark.

First order of business, a PSA:  Don’t schedule a birthday party for your kid for the afternoon of the Super Bowl.  (Unless you’re also hosting a Super Bowl party and lots of friends and their families are scheduled to show up.)  We originally invited seven kids and an eighth sort of invited herself (but it was okay!).  The end result?  Three kids, one of whom was not feeling good.  Nonetheless, we all had a good time.

First, the cakey goodness from the hands of OmegaDad:

Isn’t that purty?!

Then, OmegaDad being a monster:

Then OmegaMom as monster, sliding down:

And OmegaMom being swarmed by kids.  Can three kids be called “a swarm”?  I was a horse who had fallen over.

I can say that it is mighty damned hard to be stuck in the doldrums when one is bouncing around with screaming, giggling kids.  Which is good.  It provided a much-needed boost in the emotion department, fer shur.

Aside from the low turnout, the main problem was arriving at Le Bounce Haus ten minutes before 1 p.m. and having the young lady at the counter blink blankly when we announced we were here for our scheduled (ahem!) party.  She said there were no parties scheduled for that day, and she was just about to close because no-one had shown up in hours for free-bounce time.

W.T.F. ?!?!

Double-plus UnGood.  I was about to go into panic mode and hyperventilate.  Luckily, I had handy in my purse a copy of the contract, which I flourished in her face, she called the owner, the owner made the executive decision to keep things open, and all went well.

Then there was the large woman with her large kids who decided to just help herself to some of our supplies.  OmegaDad was most put out by this. 

Since one of the things helping keep me in my funk is that the house is constantly looking like a hurricane or tornado or earthquake hit, I have taken the day off to apply some muscle power to things.  This should count as exercise, too; as some of my (lovely!  wonderful!  sweet!  kind!  helpful!  sympathetic!) commenters pointed out, exercise is a really good way to combat the Black Dawg.  As is just writing it all out, having people read, and comment, and say, “Oh, yeah, BTDT.”  Very funny, that:  just having people say they understand and are feeling the same way, some of the black is lifted and turned to light gray.  So thanks!

TeenDoc, at Welcome To the Dollhouse, posted an interesting challenge:  Write your life in 100 words, no more, no less.

I thought I’d take it on.  Now, having re-read TeenDoc’s paragraph, I feel mine doesn’t have “flavor” or “depth” or something (in other words, I liked her approach much better).  But, nonetheless, here goes:

Born in Chicago to Beatnik parents.  Father intense, musical, mathematical, gifted.  Mother calm, artsy, pragmatic writer.  Lonely, awkward geek through my teens.  In college, ignored programming in favor of writing historical romances. Dropped out to work on magazine; returned to college and dropped out again two more times. Moved to Arizona, then California. Returned to college and decided programming was okay after all. Applied to national labs internship for the hell of it. Met OmegaDad there. Moved to Lubbock. Started trying for a baby. Moved to Arizona. Endured infertility and failed IVFs, then healed emotionally and adopted OmegaDotter. What’s next?

So, it’s your turn.  Do your version in the comments here, or post on your blog and link back here.

In the meantime, some notes:

In the “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth” department, OmegaUnk commented on our record-breaking string of below zero days by mentioning it was 95F in his neck of the woods that day.  My response:  Ppbbbbttttttt!

In the “Gee, thanks, that really helped a lot!” department, Kate of High Altitude Gardening commiserated with me on my recent hidden-object games addiction, asked me to start a support group, and then told me to download Madame Fate.  Which I promptly did.  Ahem.

In the “I know it doesn’t make sense, just trust me” department, Pretzel told me where to find humidifiers.  So:  Yes, it doesn’t make sense, because all my life I’ve needed humidifiers during the icy cold months just like you suggested, but in this house, we need a dehumidifier.  Currently what’s happening is that any time we bathe or run the dishwasher or boil water, more moisture enters the air, and the house is so well sealed that it congeals on the windows and around the doorjambs, and it’s cold enough outside so that what congeals on the windows and doorjambs freezes.  This is Not Good for the house.  And frustrating for us.  In fact, it’s mighty damned embarrassing to have to thump and whack on the door from the inside when there’s a cold Pizza Hut employee with (supposedly) hot pizzas waiting on the outside, just because the door is iced shut and it’s the only way to shake loose the ice and open the door…

In the “Mem’ries” department (from two respects–first off, I should have answered this weeks ago, and secondly, it’s about our trip to China to adopt the dotter):  Yes, Elaine, I did, indeed, belong to the September 2001 DTC email list, and I do think it was me and OmegaDad you met on the bridge on Shamian Island!

In the “oh, just go check her out!” department:  I’ve been meaning to write up something about women in science, sexism, and displays of femininity, prompted by a series of posts by Dr. Isis, with associated incredibly thoughtful commentary.  But finally, my brain still frozen, I’ve decided to just point you to her blog to say “Go Forth And Read!”  She’s snarky, funny, and a rollicking good read who enjoys being a scientist and a fashionista.  Enjoy.

On the whole, the woman blogging contingent came in much more “E” than “I” in their blogs.  In fact, an overwhelming number of the blogs tested out as ESFP–”The Performer”, which I find very interesting.  Anyway, some of the ladies said that it was “spot on” or close, whereas the rest were typically INTP/INFP/ENFP.

Susie suggests that the very act of blogging lends itself to the “ES” type, and Becca suggests the same, then goes on to suggest that the Typealyzer is actually just throwing random results.

I don’t think it’s random, because when I go off to ScienceBlogs and check out the science bloggers who ran the Typealyzer, there were an overwhelming number of “IN” or “IS” blog types.

Which leads me to think that the Typealyzer actually is looking at two things:  vocabulary (splitting it into “thinking” versus “feeling” words, “extroverted” versus “introverted” vocabularies, and length of words) and verb tense (active tense=more ES, passive tense=more IN/IS).  I’d be very interested to actually see their algorithm.

It seems that the people who responded to me are typically using their blogs to talk about family things, “emotional” things, living life, whereas the folks who do science blogging are typically using their blogs to talk about science or politics.

One thing I personally do in my blog that may have an influence is regularly use active verb tense, and use short, choppy words.

All in all, a very interesting experiment.  Here are the results from my commenters:

Six years old.  You can see her tooth gaps.  I like it.  Tomorrow we are told to show up at the first quarter school general assembly because the dotter is supposed to be getting an award; I suspect it’s something like “perfect attendance” or something like that, but we’ll be there.  Then there’s the “lice letter” that showed up from the school nurse.  Ahem.  Eeek?  I have to call her to find out more info; it merely says there “was a lice concern” about the kids in the dotter’s class, and that all the kids were examined and “cleared for school”.  However, a question or two put to the dotter revealed some info that makes me really want to talk to the nurse…

A big thank you to all my commenters; your long and thoughtful replies have made me feel a bit cheerier.  I will write more substantive stuff tomorrow; tonight I’m just pooped and have a headache and want to go to bed.

Yesterday afternoon, OmegaDad came to me as I was folding clothes, and said, in an urgent, worried voice, “Come upstairs and listen to this!”  I grabbed some clothes on hangers, planning to drop off the jackets in the coat closet, listen to his mystery noise, and then drop the remainder in our closet.

He was very perturbed, and almost wouldn’t let me stop at the coat closet.  “Do you hear that noise?  In the corner?  Over by the TV?”

I listened, and smiled, a world-weary, tolerant smile.  Tap.  Tap, tap, tap.  Tap.  Tap.  Tap, tap, tap, tap.  Tap.  Tap, tap, tap.

“It’s our woodpecker.” I said.

“Our what?”

“Our woodpecker.  He’s pecking the house.”

“Our what?  We don’t have woodpeckers!”

“Yes, we do.  I swear I’ve told you about it before.  We get woodpeckers who peck at the house, up by the eaves.”

“Nooo!”  He sounded astonished.

“Yes!”

So he had to go outside to look, and the dotter had to go with him, and sure enough, just like I’d said, there was the woodpecker.

Now, mind you, I’m not happy about a woodpecker pecking at our house.  We’re going to have to have the eaves inspected next summer, just to see what sort of damage the beast has been doing.  But I certainly wasn’t surprised.

What I was surprised by was the woodpecker decided to move to the other side of the house, and then move over to the birdfeeders.  And then stay there as the dotter and I oh-so-carefully opened up the kitchen door, and I oh-so-carefully aimed the camera, and I oh-so-carefully got the picture before the bird flew off due to the blinding of the flash, which I had not oh-so-carefully turned off.  Oh, well; at least I got the one good picture.  He is, I think, a hairy woodpecker; the downy woodpecker has some black spots along the outside of the tail feathers which this dude is missing.

So that’s the nice stuff.  Onto other things:

My post yesterday stirred up a bit of emotion.  The first commenter was a regular reader and commenter who was offended by my characterization of those who believe in the Rapture and in the anti-Christ as “bat-shit crazy”.

Sigh.  I have never hidden my lack of religious belief.  I have actually written posts about it in the past.  I may not say things like what I wrote in yesterday’s post except once in a blue moon (or, more accurately, once in three years and three months), but I have to admit, I think it on a regular basis.  I typically avoid discussing religion for that very reason; it is worse than politics, in my books, because some of the nicest, friendliest, smartest folks just go…daffy…as soon as religion raises its head.  Magical thinking takes over, and rational thinking flies out the window.  People who believe “other” are suddenly seen as “less than” simply because their magical over-being is different or because they don’t believe in a magical over-being at all.

I said that it was not tolerant of me.  It’s not.  The mindset baffles me.  It baffles me that groups that profess to follow a set of “loving” precepts use that belief as an excuse to hate others.  It bothers me that there are people out there that believe, since I don’t follow any religion, don’t believe in any religion, that I can’t be moral.  Or good.  Or kind, thoughtful, gentle, blah, blah, blah.  And, believe me, there are plenty of folks of religious bent who actually write columns that get published in national newspapers that say exactly that, and additionally say that the only thing that holds all of humanity back from being greedy, rapacious, murderous, thieving, vile, sociopathic, psychopathic bastards is religion.  This has been written multiple times, in multiple columns and magazine articles, from followers of different religions.  It is, to be blunt, a bunch of horse hockey and a sad commentary on people’s viewpoints of humanity in general.

I think humanity is much, much better than that.  I don’t think we need an omnipotent magical parental figure overseeing our every waking and sleeping moment to keep us moral and striving to do the right thing.

Furthermore, I feel there are plenty of existing things that hold people apart without adding belief in mythology into the stew.

If any generic reader feels that knowing this about me means you can’t read my blog any more, I certainly accept that, and wish you well. 

I have crawled from my death bed to scrawl this note.

(Okay.  It’s not a “death bed”.  Really.  It’s just a “bad back bed”.  An “I can’t bend over” bed.  An “If I twist this way, a jolt of fire goes down my leg” bed.)

So yesterday, while congresscritters were voting down the bailout and the stock market was crashing (only to resurge again today), OmegaDad had to have a colonoscopy in Big City.  Which meant I had to drive him there and back again.  But it was at 2 p.m.–a very awkward time, to be sure, because the dotter gets off her school bus at 3:45 p.m., and there was no way on Gawd’s green earth that we would be back in time.  And our next-door neighbor, rescuers of choice in such situations, aren’t there in the afternoons, because Mama Neighbor is now working three jobs.  Ack.  So I called on M., mother of H., in a panic yesterday morning, and M. agreed to pick up the dotter and help her do homework, have a snack, play with H., all the good things…

And, oh, by the way, was the dotter invited to S.’s birthday party?  Because it was that night at 6:30, and H. was going.

Um.  Noooo, the dotter was not invited to S.’s birthday party.

But, aside from the “I’m not invited to S.’s birthday party!” woes that this would bring up, no problemo, because we surely would be back home before M. had to drive H. off to the party.

Right?

Wrong.

Because there was an accident.  On the other side of the highway.  Which caused both directions to close down.  Starting at 5:20 p.m., right around the time we were headed towards the highway.  Which we got onto at 6:45, because the feeder road we were on was also backed up, because no-one could get onto the highway.

When we drove by the accident site, OmegaDad growled about rubberneckers backing up traffic.  I said surely the accident was on both sides of the highway. 

Surely?

Nope.  When we finally got home, after picking the dotter up and apologizing profusely, up and down and left and right, I bopped onto the local newspaper’s site, and, yup, the accident was on the other side of the road.  Grrr.

Which, of course, made me think about a lot of scientific research being done on turbulent flow and the psychology of traffic jams, none of which I feel like researching on the internet right now and posting links about, but trust me, it’s there, and both types of studies are highly relevant.

Anyway, driving all that time with a bad back has ended up making me feel like shit today.

Wah.

Pretzel asks why we don’t see stars here very often.  That’s because during the summer we simply don’t have night at all, just a long, bright twilight.  And when we do have night, we often have cloud cover, so no stars.

Mrs. Figby (now at Halcyon Mama) accidentally hooked into my self-doubt with her comment “You are such a good mama.  Challenging her, and then letting her off the hook.” about the hike.  Lemme tell you, I didn’t feel like a “good mama” at all.  At the time, I was almost panicking, because I was afraid that me pushing her to try the higher part of the butte was going to End Up Very Badly.  It was looking, at one point, like the only way we were going to get the both of us down was by me carrying her.  I shudder at the thought (and not just because my back hurts like hell).

Del posted a grand story about getting stuck in the mud delivering a bobcat to a customer, long ago and far away, when the world was young…I just thought I’d make sure people saw it!

And GrannyJ commented that the first pic in the Walk in the Woods post was very similar to one of me at the same age, also in the autumn.  Mamasan, I have to say that I took a much more reminiscent photo (and I was thinking of that exact same picture), but, alas, it was blurry.  Bah!

So, let’s see:

Mamasan and Anne suggested Gloria Vanderbilt.  Mamasan also suggested low- or mid-rise jeans, which Wendy, Anne,  and Mrs. Figby seconded.  There were a trio of mentions of “Not Your Daughter’s Blue Jeans” from Nordstrom’s (Noreen, Carol Anne, and Anne), and a couple of mentions of the “curvy” jeans at the Gap (LisaC and an email).

So I decided to try one of the NYDJ’s from Nordstrom’s, one of the curvy’s from the Gap, and one of Lands End’s custom jeans.  Much to my horror, my measurements plopped me into a size 14, since you’re supposed to be ordering by the hip size mostly.  Aaaaccccckkkkk!  I halfway expect them to arrive and fit perfectly through the hips and–as usual–gape like crazy at the waist.  Or maybe just not fit at all–either being too tight or being too loose.  We shall see.

Why am I doing all this?  Well, to be honest, I just hate trying on clothes.  I can handle about an hour, and then I go batshit crazy, start foaming at the mouth, chewing the walls in the dressing room, feeling like ants are crawling all over my skin, and turning into Uber Bitch.  What’s worse is when I do that and there’s no payoff:  Nothing fits, I don’t like any of the jeans I’ve tried on, or there’s a great pair of jeans that just happens to be half an inch too tight, and none of that model in my size.

It’s just an exercise in frustration and aggravation to me.  So I am seeking out the Holy Grail on the intertubes.

(Waving “Hi!” to Wendy and Anne, who delurked.)

As for readership, as one of my long-time readers noted in an email, my RSS feed shows the whole post, and I’d get more hits if I switched to a partial feed.  Now is when we edge close to an ethical question:  Do I provide convenience for my readers (whole-post feed) or do I provide a much-needed ego-boo (partial-post feed prompting click-throughs)?  And the fact that my ego-boo would also provide views on my BlogHer ads is additional ethical fodder.  I happen to know of some people who claim that as soon as a blogger they read switches to partial posting, they immediately drop their subscription as a matter of principle.

The whole readership question is pure narcissism anyway.  It’s a revealing chink in my oh-so-bluff self-confident armor that the drop has made me stick out my lower lip and whimper, “Why is everyone going away?!  Don’t they like me any more?!”  At these times, I have to sit myself down and talk sternly:

“Self.  Quit being a whiner.  You know damned well why your hits have dropped, and it’s called ‘not updating your blogging software and pissing off Google’.”

::sniff::  “But I’m not suuuure!  Maybe it’s not that!  Maybe it’s because I’m getting boring in my old age!  Maybe what I think is good writing, or fun stuff, just plain isn’t, and it’s all been ‘pity’ reading, and they’re just clicking through because they’re sorry for me, and I know they’re all talking behind my back and laughing at me!“ 

Segue into my Self curling up in a quivering heap in the corner of the bedroom and having serious flashbacks to the anguishing angst that is “being a nerd in high school”.  I begin speaking even more sternly:

“Girl, get a grip!  You know that Google blacklisted oodles of blogs who hadn’t upgraded, because Teh Hackers were siphoning off Google search results and gaming the system with invisible SEO terms.  Your Google hits are beginning to pick up again, slowly but surely.”

Self just rocks and moans and nervously curls hair around a finger.  This is difficult, because I have short hair, but Self does it somehow.  This is also a flashback to high school, when I had hair halfway down my back, but the hair beside my face was always filled with split ends and half of it was broken off around chin length because of the constant hair twisting.

BUT!  There is always a “but”:  I’ve read about three or four other bloggers whimpering about readership lately, and they seem like hawt, trendy, interesting gals to me, so maybe it’s all a function of summertime.

At which, Self pops open a suspicious eye, peers at me, and decides that possibly–just possibly–I might be right and Self can come out of the semi-catatonic state and focus on more important things, like the fact that Crayola 24-pack crayons were a smokin’ 49 cents each at the local store, along with other good deals, so the back-to-school shopping was not as frenzy-making as it could have been…

I need reader feedback on this one, puh-leeze!

I have a Victorian figure, relatively slender on top, a well-defined waist, a natural bustle (”I’ve got a big butt, and I cannot lie!”) and wide thighs.  And I’m short.  But not quite short enough to be classified as a “petite” for pants and jeans.  Anyway, almost any time I purchase something that fits me through the butt and thighs, it has a waist that gapes like a fish.

So I’m thinking of trying out custom jeans.

Much to my dismay, after investigation it turns out that the top two most interesting online sites (myjeans.com and makeyourownjeans.com) are…well, let’s just say they have lots of dissatisfied customers.  Then there’s LandsEnd and JC Penney’s versions…Penney’s are less expensive, but they both seem to use the same approach to fitting.

My old jeans are all beginning to wear out; we’re talking “please, please O Kozmik All, please let these jeans not split beside the seams or have that small hole above the back pocket suddenly rip asunder while I’m at the back-to-school picnic!”  I desperately need new jeans.  Also, I need new (bigger, sigh) jeans that fit.

Anyway, I want to hear from YOU.  Yes, YOU.  Have any of my readers tried any custom jeans purchases online?  What were your experiences?  Satisfying?  Not satisfying?  Horrible experience?  Great experience?

(Actually, I’d like to hear from YOU whether you’ve tried it or not; OmegaMom has suddenly jumped up a bit in subscribership, while still lagging in hits, so I’d just like folks to de-lurk and say “Hi!”)

Early this a.m., I drove GrannyJ to the Big City airport, escorted her to the gate, and saw her off.  Then I drove home and fell into bed and slept, and slept, and slept.

I need a vacation from this vacation!

These past few weeks have been grand fun, but very active, and have flown by in an instant.  We climbed a glacier, took a sea cruise, wandered through the back roads in the mountains this way and that, drove up to The Big One, and poked around in non-tourist-y areas as well.

Now it’s time for life to settle back into a predictable routine.  The dotter’s school starts on Monday, as does her gymnastics team stuff.  I have to delve into my emails, which I haven’t looked at more than once in the past two weeks.  There’s a huge heap of laundry to do.  I have to figure out why our Dyson has stopped sucking and is instead making an odd noise (::sob!::).  I have to buy a full-spectrum lamp for my office, because Winter Is Coming, and I sure as snot am not going to suffer as much as I did last November and December, dammit!

Del asked for a high-res version of the sunset picture, so here it is.

Minot mentioned that the Dread Porpoise Sekrit may not be too secret for too long, as the dotter will be reading my blog before I know it.  This is, indeed, a consideration, and one I thought about before posting.  However, the main problem is keeping it secret for a few months, not years–All Will Be Revealed someday.  I just wanted the dotter to bask in the magic for a little longer.

Then there’s the fact that OmegaDotter seems bound and determined to not read.  I’m hoping that having to do homework will at least get us past the “I don’t want to ‘read’ but will startle you with out-of-the-blue random readings of street signs, trucks, business logos and what-not” stage.  She’s got some kind of block, and the end result is she sort of sticks out her lower lip when urged to read.  So I’m not too worried about the Dread Porpoise Sekrit being revealed all too soon.

Anyway, here’s hoping that now that we’ve returned to a form of normalcy, I’ll be posting more regularly…

Any ideas?

Wow!  My homeschooling post has generated a lot of chatter, new viewers, and an absolutely lovely take-off a la Mark Antony’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, written by Dana, which is an absolute must-read and much classier (and classical) than my rantlet.

Some very valid objections to homeschooling were voiced, as were some equally valid supportive points.  I’m trying to pull the various commentary together into a coherent whole that I can respond to, but it may take a while to work my way through this.

First, we have the objections to homeschooling and a few good points about public schooling:

• Kate suggested that out-of-the-home-school gives one survival instincts that are priceless in the corporate world…which can be true, but to me can be seen as a sad commentary on both schooling and corporations.  I know far too many nerds who only "survived" middle and high school, blossoming only once they were out of the strictly age-regimented, slightly Lord-Of-The-Flies world that the school system provided them.
• Lisa had a neighbor with 10 children who "homeschooled".  I put the word in quotes because apparently this family’s idea of homeschooling was to just let the children fend for themselves.  Unfortunately, yes, this can happen and does happen.
• Johnny points out that his eldest niece lost out on science and math teaching because of the prejudices of the science/math teacher in his sister’s homeschooling co-op.  This makes me sad and mad and frustrated–because any niece of Johnny’s is likely to have been more than capable of understanding and liking the scientific viewpoint.
• Dosia was homeschooled until she took control of her own life and enrolled herself in the local public school system in her sophomore year.  I salute:  that took immense guts.  I don’t think I could have gone against my own parents in so forceful a way at that age; I was a beige adolescent who liked to fade into the background as much as possible, and didn’t discover a real backbone or real courage until I had been living on my own for quite a while.  Dosia’s take is that her parents had insecurities and biases of their own that they impressed upon their children, and not having any other outlet, the children absorbed that set and have been struggling ever since to restructure their lives.

Then we look at some viewpoints from homeschooling proponents:

• Adso of Melk rightly points out that the dynamics of teaching 30 kids versus teaching three are vastly different, something totally glossed over by the author of the article.
• Dawn, a teacher who homeschooled three of her children, mentions in passing NCLB.  I despise NCLB with a passion, because I believe the way it is implemented almost forces school districts to "teach to the test".  In the Best of All Possible Worlds, school systems would sneer at the very idea of "teaching to the test" and proclaim, loudly and proudly, that providing children with good educations will allow them to pass the tests with flying colors any time.  Unfortunately, when federal funds are tied to test scores, pride and self-confidence take a flying leap out the nearest school administrator’s window.
• Erika says that her neighbor, a teacher considering homeschooling her kids, is also concerned about the way that NCLB "ties the hands" of teachers.
• Crimson Wife notes that the original article’s author has degrees in Early Childhood Education and Elementary Education.  I admit my jaw dropped when I read that.  For some reason (perhaps the poor writing, lousy structure, and the fifty kazillion spelling and grammar errors) I had just assumed that the author was a high school student, writing in response to an assignment.  I confess:  I didn’t even look to see.  That’ll teach me.

The problem, of course, is that the process and end result of homeschooling is highly influenced by the abilities, motivations, and determination of the parents doing the schooling.  On the one hand, public schooling does try to adhere to certain standards across the board, though how well the application of those standards works is spotty…on the other hand, over-standardization of homeschooling in an attempt to avoid egregious problems would end up making it a Mini-Me of the public school system.  On the one hand, you have cases like those mentioned by Johnny, Lisa, and Dosia, where homeschooling has clearly failed, either outright or in part, to produce well-balanced and well-educated end results (adults)…on the other hand, you have cases like those cited by Dawn and me, where the parents were determined to provide the best education they could for their children, while ensuring that the socializing aspects of childhood and adolescence were equally attended to.

I haven’t investigated longitudinal results.  If anyone can point me to studies done by universities or educational associations or well-respected thinktanks, I’d be interested to see them.  The problem I have is that many opponents of homeschooling tend to see it as a religion-driven method of indoctrinating children into specific religious worldviews, and throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were, by waving their hands at the extremes.  The same happens on the other side, of course.  Me–I’m a numbers person.  I like studies.  I like hard numbers.  So sue me.  If someone is going to argue that homeschooling is either Bad or Good, I want to see solid evidence to back up that argument.   I’ve got anecdotes galore on both sides, but the plural of anecdote is not data.  Give me data.

OmegaGranny has, at times, hinted to me that I might consider it, motivated, I think, by worries about the mediocrity of the public school system.  I’ve thought of it.  But I personally don’t think I’d homeschool; my dotter is strong-willed and I am short-tempered, and that combination can be deadly. 

On a side note:  Folks noted that I used the F-word.  Ahem.  Yes, I did.  What can I say?  Yo!  Dudes!  I grew up on the near-nort’ side of Chicago, near Cabrini Green!  I worked in journalism!  My peeps, they use those words!  I could use "messed up their children", but that’s a dreadfully mild way to describe what some parents do to their kids.  There are times when a good F-bomb is about the only way I can express my indignation succinctly and clearly.

Whoa!  Here I am, with a whole slew of ideas for blog posts!

A plethora of riches.  So much so that I am tossing it out to My Loyal Readers (all 15 of them!).  Which of the following would you be interested in reading?

1. I Can See Clearly Now - My journey from coke-bottle-bottom glasses to being able to see the time on the clock in the middle of the night without glasses, via LASIK.  With a tangent into the reasons why that song immediately makes me think of tuna salad.  This one is mostly for SpaceMom, as BadMutha has already gone & done it.
2. Walking on Sunshine - Hey–Alaska has sunshine, too!  Who woulda thunk it?  How quickly things change.
3. The Blind Leading the Nearsighted - Our nation’s economists say that the bottom one-fifth of the U.S., by income, "have access to various sources of spending money that doesn’t fall under taxable income. These sources include portions of sales of property like homes and cars and securities that are not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts."  Yahhhh, right.  Notice they don’t mention such things as credit cards, or payday loans, or plain ol’ ordinary "debt".  I’ll give you the link to the article if you choose this one.
4. Everyone Knows Homeschooling Moms Are Ticking Time-Bombs of Psychosis! - In which I read a "critique of homeschooling" and decide that the critiquer needs serious–serious–critiquing herself.
5. Code Reviews?!  We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Code Reviews! - More tech talk, mostly about the lonely life of a university tech person who is not in the ITS department, plus an apologia for NYI.
6. Looking For Closure - 77% of the houses sold in Stockton, CA, in January were foreclosure sales.  In the Sacramento, CA, area there were 1,815 homes sold in January, but almost as many–1,782–foreclosures were recorded in that area in the same month.  Similar things are happening all across the country.  Realtors are offering "foreclosure tour" buses.  Life has changed greatly in the past two years.

Pick a topic.  Any topic.  Or suggest one.

With a kaleidoscope, you turn the end of the tube ever so slightly, and the pattern shifts completely.  Life, right now, is a kaleidoscope.

For example:  I was driving up to Former State Capitol, almost to mom’s house, after 12 hours of traveling.  At a stop light, I ran my hand through my hair, and thought to myself:  “Hah!  Well, at least I got my hair cut a few weeks ago, so that’ll be okay with…”

And there was that shift:  My normal everyday “I’ve got to look neat and orderly when I show up at Grandma’s house” thought was stopped in its tracks.  No, I didn’t have to worry about whether my hair was tidy.

Another shift:  Mom, talking to me about her feelings right now, said that she had always thought of herself as younger than her compeers, because her mother was still alive.  And now, she said, now she is Eldest.  Suddenly the patterns in life have changed:  we don’t have a 104-year-old to judge our ages by, and mom, at  81, is, indeed, Eldest.

Another:  Driving up mom’s street, thinking about things to be done, I said to myself, “Well, after we run x errand and y errand, we can swing by…”

No.  We can’t swing by Grandma’s.

It isn’t grief.  It isn’t even deep sorrow.  These past few months have not been happy ones for Grandma.  Her world had shrunk again, suddenly, at the whim of outsiders–too frail for the assisted living center, so she had to go to a nursing home.  She didn’t like it.  She kept asking when she could go home.  She was tired.  The atmosphere there–though the staff are caring folk–was grim and depressing (at least to a visitor).  Last Stop.  Holding Pattern.  Her mind was wandering back into the past and then dipping into the present for a small time period, just long enough to know people who cared were there, but that she just Didn’t Like It.

So it was time.

Which leaves one feeling rather odd at all the condolences.  While it’s a shift, a change, a spot where a tooth has fallen out, as it were, mostly I feel relief.  Glad that Grandma didn’t have to spend a lot of time in a place that wasn’t hers, glad that she didn’t have to spend a lot of time in a half-there state, just aware enough  to realize that her vaunted awareness was slipping away.  Glad that we didn’t have to watch while she went through invasive medical procedures or faded completely away.

So people say, with love and caring, “I’m so sorry for your loss”, and I am left feeling rather awkward, wanting to say that, yes, it’s a loss, but at the same time, it’s not.  I feel that I said my goodbyes back in December…that’s when I cried, that’s when I burrowed my head into OmegaDad’s shoulder in bed and railed against mortality.

The kaleidoscope was already shifting from one pattern  to the next, but it hadn’t completed the shift yet.

Anyway, thank you all for your caring and kind words.  We will miss Grandma, but she was already on her way months ago, and so the grief and pain are muted, felt more as a momentary disjunction between old habits and routines and those of the future.

Miss Cellania asked about “weird people” I have known.  Alas, my mind immediately went blank.  All I could think about, rather than people, were the various odd living spaces I’ve either considered or lived in.

Shortly before I moved out of Chicago, I was wisting for the country life.  I was also wisting for a cheaper rental (though, looking back, I could slap myself upside the haid, because I had a lovely one-bedroom rental with built-in bookcases flanking a defunct fireplace, a balcony, hardwood floors, and lots of closet space for the amazing price of $365 per month, all in a place that was walking distance from the beach and lots of nice restaurants).

Anyway, yearning for a different place to live, I scoured the classifieds in the Chicago Reader week in and week out.  Most were retreads of what I was in–three flats, small brick apartment buildings, some swanky stuff on or near the Magnificent Mile.

But one day, I read an ad that piqued my curiosity.

They were renting a silo.  A real live, honest-to-goodness, grain silo.  Four floors, one room per floor, hardwood floors.

They also had a refurbished barn for rent.

It was way the hell and gone north of the city, but it sounded just too cool for words, so I called the owner up and set up an appointment to view the silo.

It looked great from the outside, but once you were in it, it was quite the letdown.  I had had visions of a spiraling staircase on the inside of the walls, circling up the interior, with each room using the most of the space (like this).  Alas, the guy who had done the work was…um…lacking in imagination.  Or dumb.  Or just plain weird.  Y’see, he had built this weird boxlike structure down the middle of the silo with the stairs there.  It ate up all the space.  What was left was, oh, four feet of space surrounding the stairwell.  And the stairwell was no great shakes, either; it was rickety and poorly built and looked like the slightest bit of wind coming through the cracks in the silo would have it all come tumbling down.

My heart was broken and I abandoned my silo dreams.

Years later, when I went back to college for the final time in the Bay Area, I knew I needed an inexpensive place to live.  So, once again, I found myself scouring the rental ads.  Interestingly enough, in the East Bay, there were lots of little cottages to rent–inexpensively, too.  But each time I called, the ad had been out for a day already, and the place was rented (no doubt to other penniless, hungry students).

One day, I found an ad the day it was posted.  I called the guy up.  I went to take a look.

And ohmigosh, it was just darling.  It was a tiny little 10×20 cottage in the back of a house at the bottom of the San Leandro hills.  It had a wall full of French windows, a teeny-tiny galley kitchen, an itty bitty bathroom with a shower stall, and exposed rafters painted white.  I was sunk.

The most interesting thing?  It started life as a chicken coop.  Yes.  I lived for two years in a former chicken coop–and I loved it.  There was an avocado tree right outside those French windows…there was a boxed flower bed at the foot of the itty bitty porch, which I filled with California poppies…there was a bottle-brush tree beside the porch…It was wonderful.  Best of all, I could pop into my car, drive up the hill five minutes, and be able to hike around the San Leandro Reservoir.

These days, of course, we live in a log cabin in the piney forest–a dream for many folks.  We almost bought an octagonal house, instead (apparently, they were all the rage for vacation homes in this area for a while).  But I still yearn for a yurt, or an earthship, or something equally offbeat, miss my darling cottage, and daydream about what that silo could really have been like, if the owners had just tried a bit harder.

Technorati: Silo, yurts, earthships, non-standard housing

SpaceMom asked:

Has the experience of being a mother changed you in any profound ways? Or are you still Omega woman just with another section added to your life?

When I was a non-mom, there were some particular emails that got forwarded on and on, over and over.  One was “practice for parents-to-be“, always good for a guffaw or two.  Another was “Motherhood–it will change your life“, which was always good for either a tear or two or a screech of annoyance accompanied by a full-scale meltdown, depending on where I was emotionally with respect to infertility.

Really.  When you’re in the midst of a harrowing attempt to just get pregnant, you don’t want those reminders of just how your life changes.  And, to top it all off, you just don’t know how your life will change.  Oh, you can imagine it.  You can come up with all sorts of rosy scenarios.  And, as any childless person will tell you, it’s grating to have parents tell you, “You just don’t know what it’s like.”

Um.

I hate to say it, but…well, you just don’t know what it’s like.

Paradoxically, the profoundest change has been that I’ve become more patient and I’ve become more impatient.

I never realized just how much patience it takes to tell or show a small person, for the umpteenth time, how to do something.  These days, I am able to achieve a zen-like stage in some areas of interaction with the dotter–either I’m aware that this is something that just takes lots of repetition to sink in, or else blowing a fuse about it is way down the “battles I want to start” list.

On the other hand, sometimes that zen-like stage just goes “whoosh!” and I am a veritable volcano of impatience.

Who’d've thunk it?

Having a small child around takes time…lots of time.  And, I admit, I resent it sometimes.  Before Dotter, I would spend an hour or two a day hiking around the woods surrounding Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods.  I’d get home, grab the dawg’s leash and the dawg, we’d pile into the car, drive ten minutes or less to one of my favorite trails, and be off.  I’d be able to spend the time to look, to listen, to breathe in the fragrance of the woods.  I loved it.  It nourished my soul.

For a very short time after we brought OmegaDotter home, I was/we were able to do hiking–we’d stuff her into a baby-backpack and head on out.  But only a few short months after she came home, she became a toddler.  A very stubborn toddler, who Did Not Want the baby backpack.  And my hikes suddenly came to a screeching halt.

We are at the point where I can now take her out with me for short hikes.  What, to me, are very short hikes.  Slowly, slowly, she is increasing her stamina and interest.  But even so, while at times it’s grand to have her along, dancing and running and peering and chattering away, I still miss–extremely–those hours of peace and relaxation spent among the trees.

(The dawg, too, misses this.  The dawg has become fat.  Very fat.  Sigh.)

I’ve become more empathetic and compassionate, and, paradoxically, less so.  I find news stories about little girls being kidnapped and raped, or just lost, or dying, to be excruciating.  I can’t read them any more; while I felt it intellectually before, now…now I put a little girl’s face to that faceless news story, my breath catches in my throat and my heart skips a beat.  My liberal “oh, he must have had a bad life!” intellectual reasoning about the perpetrator gets buried deep underneath a very primal desire to rip his jugular out.

I didn’t know how your heart could fill with all-out pride at some very simple things–like a child who only weeks before couldn’t take a step out onto the ice rink suddenly being able to fly around on the skates.

I didn’t realize just how hard capabilities that adults take for granted are to learn.  Lost in the mists of time are my own feeble first attempts at buttoning buttons, tying knots, or reading.  Now, when the dotter tries something new, I can see just how hard it is to learn the basics, have the ability to stick with it and practice, and then, suddenly one day, it becomes easy.

I didn’t know how just looking at a sleeping child could take your breath away.

I didn’t know that you could look at that sleeping child and see the teenager-to-be, and have your heart fill with worry about some faceless unknown pimply teenage boy.

Oh, yeah, it changes everything.  Honestly.  But, at heart, I’m the same OmegaMom, with additional depth.

Technorati: Motherhood, parenting

Good on ya, mates, you came through quite nicely!  Plenty of ideas to tide me over until something in the news piques my interest.

Now to figure out where to start.  Where to start, where to start…

Dirk asks:

Hey, that’s what AmFam just did… is this national “ask the blogger a question” week?

Yup, I shamelessly stole the “Ask me some questions!  Please!  I’m desperate!” directly from AmFam; it worked for her, so it had to work for me a bit, too.

Why do you use blogger and not one of the other blogging tools?

Because I’m lazy and cheap.  And because, when all my internet buds leaped on the blogging bandwagon, and I, lemming-like, followed them, they were all on Blogger.  So I went there.  It was quick, it was easy, it was painless, and I could concentrate on writing.

When I started posting on a regular basis, I soon realized that Blogger was, at best, a flawed tool.  But it was still cheap–in other words, free!  And there were all these free templates, and I could fiddle with the HTML to customize the templates.  When I looked at other freebies, I either didn’t like them enough, or I discovered, as at WordPress.com, that they strictly limited any fiddling, they only had six templates, and they didn’t allow any other templates.  Bah.

Then there was wind of BloggerBeta, and I waited, and waited, and waited to get an invite to switch over so I could take advantage of labeling and a few other things they claimed would be there.  Then I got the invite, and tried to switch over.

Bahahahaha!

Let me just say that my blog is too complex (har!) for BloggerBeta.  I was stuck in Blogger-to-BloggerBeta limbo for quite a while.  Any time I logged in, it prompted me to switch over.  I’d try to switch over and would get an error message saying that I had tried previously, and there was an error, and they’d let me know when it was time to switch over.  I’d log in again, and there would be that same “switch to Blogger Beta” message. Over and over and over again.

Many people in that same situation have been unable to post at all.

I, however, overcame both some of the limitations of Blogger and got around the limbo by using LiveWriter.  It’s basic, but it has some nice features:  I can blog offline; I can have a WYSIWYG view of my blogging as I write–in other words, it has grabbed my css and layout, and when I write a post, it looks almost exactly what it will look like when I publish and get online (yay!); and it lets me do bold and italic and underlining and strikethrough and colored fonts and numbered or unnumbered lists and blockquotes and weblinks (SBird, here’s how!) with a click of the button; AND it let me post to my limbo-ized blog until I could finally figure out how to get the attention of someone in Blogger support who un-limboized me.

That said, I dearly want to move over to a hosted solution, with my Very Own Domain.  I’ve found a good place, and am planning to move over, using WordPress, with my own personalized template which I am very comfy with.

Why do you post so few pictures?

Well.  Hm.  Sometimes I do a picture post, usually after the dotter and I have gone somewhere and I’ve gotten lots of pics.  But I have some reservations.

First off, there are Weird Folks on the web.  Some of the WFs take little girls’ pictures and w@nk off to them, the idea of which just creeps me out.  Of course, there’s nothing I can do about it, and there may be, for all I know, folks who have already downloaded her pics and are–right now!–”doing it”.  Ew.  I have decided not to post a few pics of her especially because of this issue, some very cute pictures, that I just don’t want creeps messing with.

Then there are the WFs who like to take other people’s pictures (and posts, and sometimes entire blogs!) and pass them off as their own.  WTF?  So far, when I search on phrases from my blog, I haven’t found them.  But I do know of a few cases where someone’s entire blog was plaigiarized. 

Doing pics is a pain sometimes.  You have to download them from the camera.  You have to crop them and resize them.  You have to upload them to a photo-hosting service (or your website if you’re on a hosted site).  Then…then…you can put them into your blog. 

I waffle on the privacy issue.  Somewhere along the line, OmegaDotter will turn into a teenager, and be all bristly and touchy about odd things.  She may decide that my blog is okay so long as I disguise stuff…she may think it’s okay to post pics of her, she may not…

And then there’s the fact that sometimes I’m writing about stuff that I don’t have pictures of…like, say, cute little four-celled embryos.  I could always “borrow” them, but if I do, I like to give full credit–a link to the giving site, a person’s name if I can find it.  Sometimes I forget.  Eeek!

More later.  See how easy it is for me to spew words out if there’s a focus?  You guys have generously given me days–maybe weeks!–worth of posts.  Yay!

Technorati: Q&A, Blogger, Live Writer, pictures

I am throwing myself upon my readers’ mercy.  My brain is a blank, and has been for days.  Ask me some questions.  Suggest a topic.  Help!